When Senator Chuck Hagel, who has been sharply critical of the Bush administration’s portrayal of the situation in Iraq, was asked for his response to Iraq prime minister Iyad Allawi’s address to Congress last week, he said the speech was good but “the prime minister was not going to go before the Congress of the United States or the people of this country and interject any element of doubt or questioning about his government’s purpose or focus or credibility or ability.”

Particularly not when, as the Washington Post reports, “the U.S. government and a representative of President Bush’s reelection campaign had been heavily involved in drafting the speech.”

Dan Senor, former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and now a Bush campaign spokesman, “sent Allawi recommended phrases” and helped the Iraqi prime minister “rehearse in New York” prior to the speech. The two men know each other from Senor’s time in Baghdad as CPA spokesman.

The Times also says that the U.S. embassy in Baghdad helped with the speech, along with other government officials and “friends of the administration.”

Observers of the Allawi speech had remarked on its similarity to recent addresses by President Bush, but no one appears to have suspected that it was a Bush campaign speech.

The revelations can be expected to damage Allawi’s credibility as an independent politician in Iraq.

An imaginary White House official denied that strings had been digitally removed from official photos of the speech.

At the same time as the details of Bush campaign involvement in writing Allawi’s speech began to emerge, the U.S. government announced that it would follow the lead of the Iraqi government in making politically sensitive information unavailable to reporters.

In an apparent response to a September 26 front page Washington Post story on the increasing frequency of insurgent attacks on U.S. and other foreign troops in the country, the U.S. Agency for International Development said it will no longer release information reported by Kroll Security International. The Post story used figures from the latest Kroll report.

A USAID spokesman said the decision was taken to keep the reports from falling into enemy hands, but an internal USAID email obtained by the Post contradicts the statement.

“This is the last Kroll report to come in. After the WPost story, they shut it down in order to regroup. I’ll let you know when it restarts.”

Iraq’s government last week ordered the Iraq health ministry not to release additional statistics on civilian casualties in the country after a Knight Ridder article reported health ministry findings that U.S. and Iraqi military actions have killed far more civilians than have died in attacks launched by insurgents and terrorists.

An offical at the non-existent Washington think tank, The Three Monkeys Project, said on condition of anonymity that the organization had provided the U.S. and Iraqi governments with a report detailing information that U.S. voters might find “disorienting” in the runup to the elections and providing recommendations on how best to repackage the information or remove it from circulation.

“You have no need to know,” the official said.

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